Archive for 28 septiembre 2013

Russian Communists and their supporters are seen through a transparent portrait of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as they lay flowers at his tomb at the Red Square in Moscow on March 5, 2013, to mark the 60th anniversary of Stalin’s death.Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/Getty Images

The phrase “American exceptionalism” has been much in the news ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times taking issue with President Obama’s statement that America’s foreign policy “makes us exceptional.” “I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism,” Putin countered. “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

Putin’s comments revived an old discussion about the origins of the phrase. On Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall addressed an article by Terrence McCoy—”How Joseph Stalin Invented ‘American Exceptionalism‘”—that appeared last year on the Atlantic’s website. And on Real Clear Politics, Robert Samuelson wrote that “the most interesting fact to surface in the ensuing debate over “American exceptionalism” is that the phrase was first coined by Putin’s long-ago predecessor, Joseph Stalin.” But should Stalin really get the credit?

First off, it’s important to note that “American exceptionalism” has moved through a few different historical waves (as linguist Mark Liberman observed last year in his piece, “The third life of American Exceptionalism“). The first wave was in the ’20s and ’30s, when American socialists argued over whether the United States was immune to what Marx thought was an inevitable move of capitalist societies toward communism by means of violent struggle. The second wave (the focus of Josh Marshall’s TPM post) came after World War II, when historians like Richard Hofstadter reframed the question of “American exceptionalism” in a more positive manner, as a way to explain how the U.S. had avoided the bloody conflicts experienced by Europe in the 20th century.

Most recently, as when “exceptionalism” became a buzzword among Republican presidential candidates in the last election, the term takes on highly patriotic overtones, resonating with Ronald Reagan’s image of the U.S. as “a shining city on a hill.” Republicans have faulted Obama for lacking faith in American exceptionalism, which may have encouraged his “exceptional” rhetoric in his address to the nation on Syria. That might play well for a domestic audience, but to Putin it sounded jingoistic.

But back to Putin’s predecessor, Stalin. McCoy’s piece for the Atlantic seeks to dispel the idea that Alexis de Tocqueville had something to do with creating the expression. (He did call the U.S. “exceptional” in Democracy in America, but not to imply that the country was somehow extraordinary, as Mark Liberman also noted.) In the place of the de Tocqueville myth, however, McCoy introduces another:

In 1929, Communist leader Jay Lovestone informed Stalin in Moscow that the American proletariat wasn’t interested in revolution. Stalin responded by demanding that he end this “heresy of American exceptionalism.” And just like that, this expression was born. What Lovestone meant, and how Stalin understood it, however, isn’t how Gingrich and Romney (or even Obama) frame it. Neither Lovestone nor Stalin felt that the United States was superior to other nations—actually, the opposite. Stalin “ridiculed” America for its abnormalities, which he cast under the banner of “exceptionalism,” Daniel Rodgers, a professor of history at Princeton, said in an interview.

Stalin, to say the least, wasn’t happy with Lovestone’s news. “Who do you think you are?” he shouted, according to Ted Morgan’s biography of Lovestone. “(Leon) Trotsky defied me. Where is he? (Grigory) Zinoviev defied me. Where is he? (Nikolai) Bukharin defied me. Where is he? And you! Who are you? Yes, you will go back to America. But when you get back there, nobody will know you except your wives.”

While the heated exchange between Lovestone and Stalin is well-attested (it led to Lovestone’s expulsion from the Communist Party), it’s rather easy to debunk the notion that Stalin introduced the phrase “American exceptionalism” at this meeting. The biography cited by McCoy states that Lovestone and his delegation set sail from New York on March 23, 1929, and the delegation arrived in Moscow on April 27. Lovestone’s confrontation with Stalin had to have been after that date. But the earliest example given by the Oxford English Dictionary is from a few months earlier, in the Jan. 29 issue of the Daily Worker:

1929 Brouder & Zack in Daily Worker (N.Y.) 29 Jan. 3/2 This American ‘exceptionalism’ applies to the whole tactical line of the C.I. as applied to America. (This theory pervades all the writings and speeches of the Lovestone–Pepper group up until the present.)

And Lovestone may have been using the term earlier than that, as the OED also includes a bracketed citation from the Nov. 1928 issue of the Communist in which he lays out the “exceptionalism” thesis: “We are now in the period of decisive clashes between socialist reformism and communism for the leadership of the majority of the working class. This is in all countries of high capitalist development with the exception of the United States where we have specific conditions.”

If Stalin did indeed tell Lovestone (presumably through an interpreter) to end the “heresy of American exceptionalism” when they met in the spring of 1929, Stalin would have been throwing the phrase back at him rather than coining it anew, since Lovestone’s position on the matter had already been reported in the Communist press. Of course, that doesn’t make for as good a story. Then again, as long as Americans are feeling so patriotic in this latest wave of “exceptionalism,” why shouldn’t Americans get credit for coining the expression, rather than a French writer like de Tocqueville or a Soviet leader like Stalin?

Sgt. Andrew M. Chandler began his memoir of fighting at Chickamauga with utilitarian prose that belied the horrible, bloody waste that the battle wrought on northwest Georgia in September 1863. “I was engaged in the battle of Chickamauga, belonged to the Forty-fourth Mississippi Regiment, Patton Anderson’s Brigade, Hindman’s Division,” he wrote for an 1894 article in Confederate Veteran magazine.

The highlight of Chandler’s story occurred on the second day of the battle, after he participated in a charge that resulted in the capture of a Union artillery battery. “In this charge we, our brigade” – which fought under the command of Maj. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman – “broke the Federal line and drove them nearly one mile, when we were recalled and reformed, and marched back to the old field, which was literally covered with dead and wounded Yankees,” he wrote.

The federals had sent more troops to fight the Mississippians. As the bluecoats converged on their position, Chandler recalled an exchange that he had with Hindman, a dapper dresser bursting with aggression from his 5-foot-1-inch frame. “General Hindman stopped his horse in rear of our company, when I said to him, ‘General, we are the boys to move them!’ he replied, ‘You are, sir.’ We were then ordered to the foot of a long ridge, heavily wooded. After remaining there lying down for some twenty minutes, the Yankees charged our brigade.”

Chandler abruptly ended his narrative here. He did not describe the rest of the attack – which was strange but telling, because during the fighting a bullet tore into his right leg and ankle and took him out of action. But Chandler’s military records and an anecdote passed down through the family over the following century and a half filled in the rest of his story.

A surgeon examined the 19-year-old Chandler as he lay on the battlefield, determined the wound serious and sent him to a makeshift hospital. Soon afterward Chandler was joined by Silas, a family slave seven years his senior.

In the hospital, according to family history, surgeons decided that the injured leg could not be saved and decided to amputate. Then Silas stepped in. As one of Chandler’s descendants explained, “Silas distrusted Army surgeons. Somehow he managed to hoist his master into a convenient boxcar.” They rode the rails to Atlanta, where Silas sent a request for help to Chandler’s relatives. An uncle came to their assistance, and brought both men home to Palo Alto, Miss., where they had started out two years earlier.

When the war broke out in 1861, Chandler enlisted in the “Palo Alto Confederates,” a local military company that eventually joined the 44th Mississippi. His concerned mother, Louisa, sent Silas, one of her 36 slaves, off to war with him.

Thousands of slaves served their masters and masters’ sons in the Confederate Army before and after the “Black Republican” in the White House, as some referred to President Abraham Lincoln, issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Many remained with their owners throughout the war.

Silas had known nothing but slavery his entire life. Born into bondage on the Chandler plantation in Virginia, he moved with the family to Mississippi when he was about 2. He was trained as a carpenter, and the Chandlers brought in extra income by hiring Silas out to locals in need of his skills — a common practice in the antebellum South. The money Silas earned by his labor was paid to the Chandlers, who gave him a small portion. According to a story passed down through Silas’s descendants, he saved the pennies that he received in a jar that he hid in a barn for safekeeping.

Around 1860 Silas wed Lucy Garvin in a slave marriage, not recognized by law. A light-skinned woman, she was the illegitimate daughter of a mulatto house slave named Polly and an unnamed plantation owner. She was classified as an octoroon, or one-eighth African, which determined her legal status as a slave.

The next year Silas bid his newlywed wife farewell and went to war with Chandler. He shuttled back and forth from encampments in Georgia and elsewhere to the plantation in Mississippi to procure and deliver much-needed supplies to Chandler. No account exists that Silas ever attempted to flee to Union-held territory.

At the Battle of Chickamauga, the 44th went into action with 272 men and suffered 30 percent casualties, including Chandler. According to the Chandler family, Silas accompanied him to Mississippi. “A home town doctor prescribed less drastic measures and Mr. Chandler’s leg was saved.”

Chandler “was able to do Silas a service as well,” noted the family. During one campaign, Silas “constructed a shelter for himself from a pile of lumber, the story goes. A number of calloused Confederate soldiers attempted to take Silas’s shelter away from him, and when he resisted threatened to take his life. At this point Mr. Chandler and his comrade Cal Weaver, came to Silas’s defense and threatened the marauders with the same kind of treatment they had offered Silas. This closed the argument.”

Chandler’s Chickamauga wound ended his combat service. But Silas went back to the front lines with Chandler’s younger brother, Benjamin, who enlisted in the Ninth Mississippi Cavalry in January 1864.

Silas accompanied the younger Chandler and the rest of the Ninth as they skirmished with advance elements of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s army through Georgia and the Carolinas. Then, during the Confederacy’s final days, Benjamin Chandler and a detachment of his fellow Mississippians joined the military escort that guarded President Jefferson Davis as he and his entourage fled Richmond.

By the time Davis reached Georgia, fears that his large escort would draw the attention of numerous Union patrols crisscrossing the countryside in search of him prompted commanders to act. On May 7, 1865, most of the escort was disbanded. Davis continued to ride south with a much smaller and less conspicuous guard.

Benjamin Chandler and Silas were part of the group ordered to disband. Three days later, Chandler surrendered to federals near Washington, Ga. Silas was by his side.

President Davis was captured the same day, about 175 miles south in the Georgia village of Irwinsville.

Silas returned home, and reunited with Lucy. They eventually had 12 children, 5 of whom lived into adulthood. Silas became a carpenter in the Mississippi town of West Point, and he taught the trade to at least four of his sons. “They built some of the finest houses in West Point,” noted a family member, who added that Silas and his boys constructed “houses, churches, banks and other buildings throughout the state.”

Silas lived within a few miles of his former masters, the Chandler brothers. In 1868, Silas and other freedmen constructed a simple Baptist altar near a cluster of bushes on land adjacent to property owned by Andrew and his family. The freedmen soon replaced it with a wood-frame church. In 1896, one of Silas’s sons participated in the construction of a new church on the same site.

In 1888, Mississippi established a state pension program for Confederate veterans and their widows. African-Americans who had acted as slave servants to soldiers in gray were also allowed to participate. Over all, 1,739 men of color were on the pension rolls, including Silas.

Benjamin Chandler died in 1909. Silas passed away in September 1919 at age 82. Andrew Chandler survived Silas by only eight months. He died in May 1920.

In 1994, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy conducted a ceremony at the gravesite of Silas in recognition of his Civil War service. An iron cross and flag were placed next to his monument.

The event prompted mixed reactions from descendants of Silas and Andrew. Silas’s great-granddaughter, Myra Chandler Sampson, denounced the ceremony as “an attempt to rewrite and sugar-coat the shameful truth about parts of our American history.” She added that Silas “was taken into a war for a cause he didn’t believe in. He was dressed up like a Confederate soldier for reasons that may never be known.”

But Andrew Chandler Battaile, great-grandson of Andrew, met Myra’s brother Bobbie Chandler at the ceremony. He saw the experience a bit differently. “It was truly as if we had been reunited with a missing part of our family.”

Bobbie Chandler, for his part, accepts the role his great-grandfather played in the Confederate army. He observed, “History is history. You can’t get by it.”

On September 17, lawyers from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University joined the Texas State Conference of the NAACP, the Mexican American Legislative Caucus of the Texas House of Representatives, and others in a lawsuit to overturn a new state voter identification law (Brennan Center).

A month earlier, North Carolina enacted a statute containing several reforms, including a requirement that voters produce government-issued photo identification and a seven-day reduction in the period for early voting.

These and similar proposals in other states have sparked sharp partisan fights. Democrats believe that they violate the Voting Rights Act and constitute deliberate efforts by Republicans to suppress voting by nonwhites, students, and others who by and large do not favor the GOP. Firmly denying any intent of malice against any demographic group, Republicans insist that reforms are needed to combat voter fraud.

Conflicts over voting are as old as the republic, but they have intensified since President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election and the Supreme Court’s June 2013 decision striking down Section Four of the Voting Rights Act, which determined the states and localities required to seek federal approval for changes in election laws. “Preclearance,” as this policy was commonly known, applied primarily to the South. Republicans have tended to applaud the Court’s ruling, arguing that discrimination against nonwhites once was a problem but is now so rare that federal oversight is no longer needed. Colin Powell stands a rare exception within the GOP; he has denounced the North Carolina statute as morally wrong, based on inaccurate beliefs about the extent of fraud, and politically suicidal. The Republican Party, he contends, should be reaching out to blacks and other nonwhites.

For some observers, these developments are the latest chapter in the shift of the pro-civil rights “party of Lincoln” to a southern-controlled, states’ rights GOP that has little room for African Americans. Didn’t overwhelming majorities of congressional Republicans favor the Voting Rights Act in 1965? Yes. In the Senate, thirty Republicans backed the legislation, and only two opposed. House Republicans voted five-to-one for it. As Republicans have been noting ever since, that was a higher percentage of support than registered by Democrats.

A closer look at the events of 1965, however, reveals that the current Republican approach to voting is more similar to that of a half century ago than the final congressional tallies indicate. So, too, is the contemporary political context.

In March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson proposed legislation that greatly expanded federal authority over state election laws, particularly in the South. The bill contained a “trigger” provision that used voter participation data from 1964 to automatically suspend literacy tests in several southern states and bring those states under the preclearance requirement. This approach would relieve individuals and organizations of many of the considerable legal hurdles (and, in numerous instances, personal risk) of filing lawsuits. That case-by-case method had been tried under the 1957 and 1960 civil rights laws but had resulted in few new black voters.

Led by Everett Dirksen (Ill.), Senate Republicans allied with non-southern Democrats to defeat southerners’ efforts to preserve local autonomy, most notably their attempts to delete the trigger and preclearance provisions. Republicans also backed cloture, which ended the southern Democrats’ filibuster and ensured that the bill would pass.

House Republicans initially rallied behind legislation, offered by Gerald Ford (Mi.) and William McCulloch (Oh.), that enhanced federal jurisdiction compared to earlier civil rights laws but nevertheless preserved more state autonomy compared to Johnson’s. Their bill did not automatically ban literacy tests or contain preclearance requirements. Since the early twentieth century, Republicans had favored literacy tests in their own states and insisted upon maximizing state authority over voting rules, largely in response to high levels of immigration to the Northeast and Midwest. Low levels of black voting, Ford and McCulloch argued, might stem from factors unrelated to discrimination. The pair also pointed out that their legislation would apply to more southern states than did the president’s. Prominent civil rights groups and leaders preferred Johnson’s approach, however.

The Senate’s action, plus the sizable Democratic majority in the House, meant that the Ford-McCulloch legislation had no chance. House Republicans then fell in line with the winning side. Just one of the seventeen Republicans from the ex-Confederate states voted for Johnson’s measure. Southern Republicans, in other words, were just as eager as southern Democrats to limit Washington’s reach.

The political context of the mid-1960s also echoes the present. In 1965, Republicans were debating how to rebuild their party. The 1964 election had been a disaster not just for presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, but for the party as well. A handful of Republicans wanted to more closely align the GOP with the civil rights movement. Doing so, they argued, would increase African American support and help the party with the expanding number of whites, in the South and elsewhere, who favored a more racially egalitarian society. “We have got to get the party away from being an Anglo-Saxon Protestant white party,” Charles Percy asserted. Percy had just lost his bid to be governor of Illinois; he would be elected to the Senate in 1966. Likewise, Governor George Romney (Mi.) fired off a twelve page letter to Goldwater in which he noted that the Arizona senator had received eight million fewer votes than Richard Nixon did in 1960 and voiced alarm over the “southern-rural-white” thrust of the senator’s campaign. “The party’s need to become more broadly inclusive and attractive,” Romney emphasized, “should be obvious to anyone.”

Romney and Percy were minority voices within their party. Most Republicans continued to agree with Goldwater that the black vote was largely unwinnable and essentially irrelevant. Whites far outnumbered African Americans in most of the nation, including most of the South. As Johnson’s bill was being debated, state and local Republicans from Dixie warned northern GOP lawmakers that allying with president would undermine the party’s recent growth in Dixie. Worried that the elimination of literacy tests would mean a large influx of black voters, one Louisiana organization appealed to Nixon to lobby congressional Republicans on the South’s behalf. Illiterate African Americans, they wrote the former vice president, simply followed Democrats’ instructions or sold their votes for beer or a few dollars. The head of the Mississippi GOP predicted chaos “if large numbers of ignorant, illiterate persons are suddenly given the vote.”

Concerns over fraud were not limited to the South. Believing that the Democrats had stolen the 1960 election through fraud in Chicago and elsewhere, the RNC had launched Operation Eagle Eye in 1964. Republicans across the nation tried a variety of techniques to prove that many African American voters were ineligible. Republicans also worked to dissuade blacks from voting by spreading false information in African American neighborhoods regarding the voting process. Operation Eagle Eye flopped, but Republicans would continue to use many of these methods in the decades ahead.

Timothy N. Thurber is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, and author of The Politics of Equality: Hubert H. Humphrey and the African American Freedom Struggle, and, most recently, Republicans and Race: The GOP’s Frayed Relationship with African Americans, 1945–1974.
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